Researchers on the pier: Academics’ use of a local internet gateway

This paper describes the establishment of an Internet gateway local to the University of Sussex, firstly as a Gopher and more recently as a World Wide Web server. There follows an account of a project currently underway to assess the practical value of Internet resources to research and the consequential training and support requirements. This assessment is planned to determine the value of a local gateway to academic researchers at Sussex and the roles specific to a local gateway that such comprehensive resources as Yahoo and BUBL cannot fulfil. The project is using an interview‐based methodology to gain an understanding of researchers’ views of Internet resource provision, and these interviews are being analysed with the help of the NUD*IST qualitative data analysis software package. The account is of research in progress, and hence does not conclude with the set of pragmatic policy proposals that forms its key objective. Instead, some indication is given of the broad early findings of the project     

PMO managers' self-determined participation in a purposeful virtual community-of-practice

Communities-of-practice (CoPs) have received significant attention within a variety of literatures but we remain largely ignorant of the potential of purposefully-created CoPs in global organisations. In this context, the challenge is likely to be convincing ‘masters’ (Wenger, 1998) on the merits of joining the conversation on practice at a distance, thus making the willingness for exchange a key to the quality and longevity of the community. We posed the question “Why would busy, dispersed, knowledgeable professionals want to join and participate in a deliberately-organised CoP?” Our 2-year collaborative action study allowed us to observe the CoP and its membership at close range. We conclude that autonomy, competence and belonging underscore participation, co-production and diffusion of innovative problem-solving and practice beyond the CoP. The study will inform organisations contemplating similar interventions and also serves as a basis for further investigation and theory building on organized CoPs by the research community.     

Managing uncertainty and discontinuous condition numbers in geometric computation

We consider operations on subdivision surfaces under the strict robustness requirement that these floating-point computations return an object with the same topological form as the true solution. The problems involved may however be ill-conditioned, and defined in terms of uncertain data, and even supplementary interval arithmetic may not ensure robustness. Trapping mechanisms are therefore proposed to resolve this difficulty.     

Playing on a holo-stage: towards the interaction between real and virtual performers

This paper presents a number of ongoing projects that will be valuable to the development of technologies for digital theatre and performance. This paper describes an EU ACTS project called RESOLV which develops an integrated system to capture real 3D environments using laser and video. Current research on motion tracking, statistical behaviour modelling and simulation is presented, and possible applications, both for visual augmentation and audio generation, are discussed. The projects presented were not originally designed in the domain of theatre and performance, however their results and output seem to be well suited to be applied in this area.     

Use of conditional probability networks for environmental monitoring

Causal or conditional probability networks (CPNs) are shown to provide a natural framework for combining a time sequence of classified satellite images with other maps for environmental monitoring. The key features of CPNs are described by way of application to an example involving the monitoring of salinization of farmland over time using satellite images and an ancillary dataset derived from a digital terrain model. It is shown that CPNs can be used to improve mapping accuracies by incorporating knowledge about the spatial and temporal variation of the map classes of interest. The methods provide a practical solution to the challenging problem of mapping and monitoring salt in farmland. The representation and propagation of uncertainty within this framework is discussed, as well as the spatial and temporal prediction of images and maps.     

Book review

Tropical Librarianship W. J. Plumbe The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Matuchen, N.J. and London, 1987     

A Mechanism for Carbon Depletion at Bondline of High-Frequency Electric-Resistance-Welded X70 Pipeline Steel

Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A - The bondline of electric-resistance-welded (ERW) linepipe steel, often etched white (i.e., ferrite) in optical microscopy, is generally believed to be...